"Let the Sun Protest" Marie-Laure Fleisch Gallery, Rome 2017 (solo)

“Let The Sun Protest”

Marie-Laure Fleisch Gallery, Rome 2017

The alchemist and the artist share the same ambition: that of doing to understand, and of understanding to transform, both themselves and the world. Alchemy and art aspire to become both a knowledge system and an instrument of transmutation.

Arturo Schwarz

There are many points of contact between art and alchemy. First of all, the terminology: alchemy is defined as “The Great Art”, the alchemist “the author”, and the alchemic opus, “The Great Work”. Indeed, both these “arts” strive to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary; both attribute further ideological and spiritual significances to materials in addition to its inherent materiality. Both represent specific models of human effort aimed to redefine Nature. Therefore, it is no coincidence that through the centuries alchemy has transmitted its ideas through art, disseminating a proliferation of allusions and symbols that have given rise to a true vocabulary, iconic and symbolic for the uninitiated but immediately perceptible to the initiated. Already in the 1400s art started to show a specific interest in alchemy: many artists were influenced by it, some of them even practiced the art of Hermes Trismegistus directly. Piero della Francesca, Cosmè Tura, Jan Van Eyck, Matthias Grünewald, Albrecht Dürer, Hieronymus Bosch, Hans Holbein, Lucas Cranach, Giorgione, Giovani Bellini, Sandro Botticelli, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Bronzino, Domenico Fetti, Guercino, Dosso Dossi, Correggio, Hans Weiditz, Parmigianino, Giulio Campagnola, Pieter Brueghel, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Giovan Battista Piranesi and Georges Seurat are only some of these names. Even during The Short Twentieth Century (Hobsbawm), artists such as Umberto Boccioni, Giorgio De Chirico, Victor Brauner, Salvador Dalì, André Masson, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Yves Klein, Joseph Beuys, Gino De Dominicis and Vettor Pisani were attracted by alchemy and the power of its symbology.

Panos Tsagaris's work is characterised by a similar fascination which emerges from a congeries of divergent elements that interlink esotericism and alchemy, freemasonry and occultism, the refined tradition of art history and the uncertainties of contemporaneity. Masterfully orchestrating the polysemy of his sources, Tsagaris creates complex works, but characterised by their calibrated equilibrium: somewhat akin to an initiatory rite, the artist penetrates within an arcane hemisphere inhabited by diverse symbols. His world is that of revelations; that in which it is officiated a coincidentia oppositorum (coincidence of opposites), based on the syncretism of apparently bizarre forms. His world is populated by different ideologies and times that plunged us into an estranging atmosphere. This is how Tsagaris shows us the road to transmutation, an eternal return, and the same reality expressed through the mutability of form. In his research, the artwork explodes and is recomposed as a fabric stretched between the past and the future. Like a taut elastic, it vibrates with contrasts, as suspended between understanding and prophecy, tradition and dissolution.

I believe it would be correct to affirm that the alchemic opus of the so-called “Great Work” is at the base of all of Panos Tsagaris's work, including the series Golden Newspapers and his abstract Untitled “paintings”, that are exhibited on this occasion. These last works take the form of a palimpsest created through an elaborate procedure and starting from the artist’s drawings inspired by alchemic mandalas or ancient medieval illustrations that he collects. From these, Tsagaris explores the structure and hidden meaning, he isolates certain parts and elements that become the basis of his research carried out in his studio with a series of mirror installations of various forms and dimensions which he photographs with his I-phone. The artist then prints large-scale copies of these images in black and white, and then he adds new mirrors and photographs them again, repeating this process until the mirrors lose their reflective properties. At this point, he transfers the images onto canvas with a serigraphic process, repeating manually the process until the superimposition of the images gives life to new and unexpected forms. Then Tsagaris intervenes with acrylic paint and lastly, some specific parts are highlighted by applying gold leaf. These works, akin to an alchemic process, tell the tale of the transmutation of material. Indeed the “Great Work” is an alchemic itinerary finalised towards the creation of the philosopher's stone. This process involves various steps leading to the gradual personal and spiritual metamorphosis of the alchemist. According to this hermetic tradition, this metamorphosis is also associated with an equal number of laboratory processes characterised by specific changes in colour: from nigredo – or the initial step in the process of creating the philosopher's stone – to rubedo, which represents the final step, culminating in the conversion of vile metals into gold, that is the victory of the spirit over matter. To express this in (Jungian) psychological terms, it is the transformation of the physical and psychic characteristics of Mankind into a higher and more spiritual level.

We witness a symbolic-material transmutation also of the medium, as this process activates an increasing ambiguity between the second and third dimensions, denouncing its irreducible post-medium condition (Rosalind Krauss). Starting from the three dimensions of a spatial installation, this is then transformed into an elaborate two-dimensional aesthetic as its becomes in succession photography, serigraphy, and finally painting. «The medium questioned here is not one of those traditional ones […]. Rather […] it regards the idea of medium as such, of medium as a series of conventions derived from (but not identical to) the material conditions of a given technical support, a conviction beyond those developed by forms of expression that can be considered either projective or mnemonic». Thus, for Tsagaris the medium is not merely a technique of execution, a support, or a material condition of the work, but more a disciplined space of possibilities.

The gold leaf and the images in the form of a palimpsest are again protagonists in the Golden Newspapers series. In addition to its alchemic symbolism, gold has always been interpreted as the colour of transcendence, of super-terrestrial light, and of divine spirituality. For this reason, it is seen in Paleochristian mosaics, in Byzantine painting and in icons which have all adopted this ancient tradition and which has remained unvaried throughout centuries until the present day. Now the significance of this material is transposed from a religious-symbolic value of the past to a socio-economic significance of the present. Since the start of the Greek financial crisis, Tsagaris has collected the front pages of the leading international newspapers (principally, The New York Times when he lived in that city), which told the difficuties of his country. Through a process of re-elaboration and selection, the artist intervenes on these pages by covering or “censoring” the texts by applying gold leaf. In this way, the artist re-contextualises the information and provocatively questions the mechanism of perception and fruition. In these works, which bring together the incorruptible and noble material par excellence with the newspaper – an object destined for immediate consumption and disposal – Tsagaris creates an unnerving dialogue between an instrument of mass communication and an archetypal material of human conscience. This is an apparently simple operation by which the newspapers are transformed into a sort of disturbing present-day religious icon, called on to tell the tale of the hardships and contradictions of contemporaneity.

Eugenio Viola

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R. Krauss, It. ed. Reinventare il medium, edited by E. Grazioli, Bruno Mondadori, Milan 2005, p.58.